Photographer of the Year - Outside Chance Takes Top Award

New
Zealand’s most coveted photography award has tonight been
swept up by documentary photographer Peter James Quinn in
its most controversial season yet.

The New Zealand
Geographic Photographer of the Year Awards celebrates
the best editorial photography across Society, Landscape,
Wildlife and Photo Story categories. Quinn didn’t win any
of these categories, but had the strongest portfolio of
images in total—a winning combination that has always been
possible in the competition but has never been achieved
before.

Quinn’s images traverse subjects as diverse as
West Coast whitebaiters, Tuhoe, and night life on
Auckland’s Karangahape Road. “In each image Peter stacks
up layers of competing ideas,” says James Frankham, editor
of New Zealand Geographic magazine and the convener of
judges for the competition. “They are wellcomposed and
visually simple expressions of the foundations of life in
New Zealand."

Quinn’s images of Tuhoe were shot at the
end of a two-year project to document the iwi during their
long transition to self-determination, a difficult
assignment that, says Frankham, “champions content over
process”. A couple dressed in piupiu push a baby stroller
through a parking lot from a kapa haka festival. A
descendant of the prophet Rua Kenana cradles the family
Bible outside his home, behind him, an ace of hearts is
tucked into the weatherboards.

“Peter’s pictures
reinforce the photographic value of being in a location so
long that you are no longer noticed, watching on as the
rites of daily life are played out, without reference to the
camera."

Other winners among the 3400 entries feature
Brett Phibbs’ image of the aftermath of a tornado in
Devonport, a bellbird caught in a mist net by his New
Zealand Herald colleague Greg Bowker, a controversial photo
essay by Tim Watters on the Sea Shepherd campaign to end
Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and
Dennis Radermacher’s mesmerising image of ‘New
Zealand’s most photographed tree’, a lake-swamped willow
in Wanaka. Edin Whitehead took out the Young Photographer
award and Alison Perkins the Colour Award. The People’s
Choice Award—which received a total of more than 36,000
public votes cast at the exhibition and online—went to
Kelly Wilson for her image of Kaimanawa horses, receiving 13
per cent of all votes. The photographs depict only New
Zealand and its dependencies, and all were shot after
January 2013. A few of the photographers are professional,
but not all. Many have entered the competition in the past,
but few have won before.

“More than technical prowess,
these photographs share an original perspective,” says
Frankham. “They provide an insight into the fabric of our
country and society that tell us something new about what it
is to be a New Zealander or live in New Zealand. Each image
trades on the access that the photographer gained, the
moment they captured, and their unique contribution as an
artist."

“Some of the images are universally delightful,
others have proved wildly controversial, but all of them
elicit a response, whether that’s charm, awe or
horror."

It was a year of controversy for the competition,
with photographer Mazdak Radjainia’s image of a speared
striped marlin gushing blood raising the eyebrows of some
exhibition goers, and images depicting whaling in New
Zealand’s Antarctic Dependency. Frankham points out that,
while New Zealand Geographic doesn’t endorse spear-fishing
of large pelagic fish or whaling, those activities take
place in New Zealand nonetheless.

“We feature difficult
pictures in New Zealand Geographic regularly,” says
Frankham. “Challenging public assumptions about the nature
of our environment and society has been at the core of the
magazine’s philosophy for 25 years. Images that create the
opportunity for those conversations to take place are what
this competition is all
about."

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